Chris Selley: Civil liberties vs. knee-jerk loyalties

When Canadians first learned that a man had died at Vancouver Airport after being confronted and Tasered by police in 2007, ideological partisans divided quickly and predictably into their pro-cop and cop-skeptic camps. There was nothing about Robert Dziekanski, a poor immigrant, to particularly elicit the pro-cop camp’s sympathy, and every reason for them to believe — based the police’s description of events — that Mr. Dziekanski had raised a fuss so significant that the three Mounties in attendance had feared for their very lives.

Nearly three years later, everyone’s seen Paul Pritchard’s iconic video. Everyone knows the RCMP tried to suppress it, that they had to be ordered to release it, how easily they might have “misplaced” it. (It’s always baffled me that they didn’t just destroy it. They would have gotten away with it.) Everyone knows they lied about pretty much everything on the tape, right down to the number of officers who confronted Mr. Dziekanski (four, not three). And everyone now realizes, at some level, that the RCMP’s version of every non-videotaped death of a civilian in its custody — there were 80 between 2002 and 2006 — is deeply suspect.

There’s still a pro-cop camp, of course. It staged a veritable big-top revival in the wake of the G20 protests in Toronto. But there’s no one left defending the RCMP, or its four lying officers, in the matter of Mr. Dziekanski’s death. So, it can happen: Canadians can step outside their ideological bunkers, join hands and stand up for a fellow human being who’s been wronged by the state. It’s just maddeningly rare that they do.

Consider the situation in Caledonia, Ont. In 2006, native protesters decided to occupy a housing development on what they believed was stolen land. The police stood by as the protesters arbitrarily controlled homeowners’ comings and goings, harassed them late at night, vandalized their property and generally made their lives intolerable. When a court ordered the protesters removed, and people such as this newspaper’s editorial board demanded the police be sent in, the left sucked its teeth. “Such a shoot-first mentality might appeal to the macho journalists at the Post,” the Toronto Star hissed in an editorial. But, it said in another, “It is difficult to see how this decision will improve relations between the feuding sides.”

So Queen’s Park did nothing, and got away with it. Later it spent millions of taxpayer dollars buying the land in order to effectively cede it to the natives, and millions more fending off a lawsuit from a ruined Caledonia couple. Then it inexplicably settled with them, also using taxpayer dollars — how many we’ll never know, as secrecy is part of the settlement.

Can anyone of any ideological stripe possibly be OK with this situation? And can anyone deny that the only reason opinions were ever divided was because the “villains” in this set piece were aboriginal — a group, like the police, that sends Canadians scattering for the ideological trenches?

There are lots more examples. Many Canadian liberals abhor the idea of human rights commissions telling the press or anyone else what they can and cannot say. But they also abhor Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, so they don’t speak up about it. Conversely, many Canadian conservatives make no bones about supporting freedom of speech in its absolute form. But when it came to freedom of assembly in downtown Toronto in late June, they couldn’t get past all the dirty hippies making use of that freedom, and retreated to their law-and-order bunker.

And then there’s Omar Khadr — an extreme case, I’ll grant. There’s nothing to like about him. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled in no uncertain terms that his rights were violated by Canadian interrogators, and has ordered that violation remedied. The government appeals, dawdles and pursues half-measures. And many ideological conservatives don’t just not give a damn — they actively cheer the government on.

In all these cases, the real villains are governments that believe, with ample justification, that they can do whatever they want to whomever they want, whenever they want. Governments don’t care what party you voted for, or what you think about the war in Afghanistan, or whether your bookshelf’s stuffed with Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand. If they think it’s in their best interests to steamroll you, they will. Ideological partisanship dilutes by half the democratic force of the revulsion we feel — or should feel — when they do. It enables the very thing we all claim to detest when it happens to people we like. The answer lies in sticking up for people we don’t like too.